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Most Extreme Gamma-Ray Blast Yet Detected
Matt_dk sends in a quote from a story at NASA:
"The first gamma-ray burst to be seen in high-resolution from NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is one for the record books. The blast had the greatest total energy, the fastest motions and the highest-energy initial emissions ever seen. ... Gamma-ray bursts are the universe's most luminous explosions. Astronomers believe most occur when exotic massive stars run out of nuclear fuel. As a star's core collapses into a black hole, jets of material — powered by processes not yet fully understood — blast outward at nearly the speed of light. The jets bore all the way through the collapsing star and continue into space, where they interact with gas previously shed by the star and generate bright afterglows that fade with time. ...Fermi team members calculated that the blast exceeded the power of approximately 9,000 ordinary supernovae, if the energy was emitted equally in all directions."
civilizations, if the odds of other life evolving to advanced civilizations is taken seriously.
That's enormously interesting.
It seems to me that, if funding were available, one of the most useful things for astronomy then would be a set of ships sent to "opposite" orbits in the solar system, extremely far from the sun. Given today's technology, the farther you could get a pair of ships orbiting at an extreme distance from the sun - out past jupiter and farther, then, you could extend the range of your parallax measurements, which are fairly direct. You'll never obviously be able to get the whole universe, but you would be able to get more standard candles. Or, are there already enough stars within a thousand light years that you don't need that? A thousand light years is a pretty good chunk of space.
This is my sig.
2) Once we know the diameter of Earth's orbit, we used parallax to determine the distance to nearby stars. Parallax is a process of triangulation, where we use the earth at two extremes and the star we are looking at as the three points of a triangle. Knowing two angles and one side lets us solve for the distance to the star. But the resolution of our telescopes only lets us use this method with any accuracy for stars in our immediate vicinity.
This is where the Gaia mission will step in and improve things drastically.
Using distant quasars as fixed beacons, Gaia will collect paralax data to all of the brightest starts in our galaxy and for a huge number of closer stars. With this data we will be able to produce a precise 3d map of our entire galaxy. We will finally be able to see it as a distant observer will see it. It will revolutionise our knowledge of space. I personally think this is the coolest astrophysics project being developed right now.